StatusLine

Introduction

This tiny package was an attempt to create a simple way of adding a status line at the bottom of a console when running node.js code in a CLI environment.

Installation

$ npm i @alt-jero/status-line

Usage

const statusLine = require('@alt-jero/status-line');

// Set/overwrite bottom line of console display
statusLine(`I'm really-fast, but ephemeral.`)

// Write a non-ephemeral line to the display (fast)
statusLine.logString(`I'm fast and stay in your line-buffer.`)

// Write via console.log while taking status line into account (slower)
statusLine.log(`I'm slower, but can handle objects and arrays.`)

// Write out an error report to the display
statusLine.error(new Error(`We'll see a stack-trace without the status line getting involved!`))

Benchmark

I have attempted to make it as fast as possible without sacrificing utility. To that end, it's possible to use the normal .log() and .error() methods which forward the given data to console.log() and console.error() respectively after clearing the status line. In the interest of speed, it's also possible to use the .logString() method if you know you just want to write a string. The latter method uses process.stdout.write() in the background, also taking the presence of the status line into account.

Below is the result of a benchmark run on my own computer: A macbook air from mid-2013 (I know, dinosaur xD) with the i7 processor and 8GiB RAM. The results show the difference in speed is miniscule.

The following have been benchmarked with 250,000 iterations:

1. process.stdout took 1.771997629 seconds
2. statusLine() took 1.462698296 seconds
3. statusLine.logString() took 2.345646944 seconds
4. console.log() took 2.327852828 seconds
5. statusLine.log() took 3.441730405 seconds

If you want to run the benchmark yourself, first be warned that the benchmark will obliterate the contents of your line buffer, as it needs to output about 1.25M lines of Running benchmark... in order to complete the test. You can run the benchmark like so:

$ npm run test